Policy & Politics Journal Blog

Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis

Ahmad Wesal Zaman, Olivier Rubin and Reidar Staupe-Delgado

The policy literature has generally presented crises as urgent public threats with clearly demarcated ‘focusing events’. As a result, most studies have identified the main challenges faced by expert agencies involved in evidence-based policymaking as managing uncertainty, time pressure and communication. However, less focus has been devoted to analysing the concrete challenges faced by expert agencies during creeping crises. Creeping crises are characterised by spatial and temporal fragmentation and elusiveness, which create an additional challenge for expert agencies: how to get the crisis on the political agenda.  

Comparing two global creeping crises: climate change (CC) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), our recently published article in Policy & Politics, highlights two distinct strategies for influencing policymaking. Our analysis showed how two expert agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), pursued different strategies when setting the global agenda and influencing policymaking. Our findings showed that the WHO’s approach to policymaking regarding AMR was mostly guided by top-down, science-led, formal engagements and strategies. This approach has successfully increased the salience of the global challenge of AMR, providing strong, evidence-based solutions. But it has been less successful in promoting the challenge onto the global political agenda.  

By contrast, the UNFCCC’s approach to policymaking has relied more on horizontal, bottom-up, multidisciplinary, informal strategies. This approach has enabled a broader coalition of advocacy actors and placed CC persistently on the global political agenda.  

In this way, the article elucidates the challenges experts face in creeping crises and analyse two strategies for getting crises onto political agendas and keeping them there. By enhancing our understanding of the role experts play in drawing attention to creeping crises, it makes a clear contribution to global policy debates and to the literatures on interest groups and social movements.  

Table of contents for special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis

Policy expertise in times of crisis
Peter Aagaard, Marleen Easton, and Brian W. Head

Analysing expert advice on political decisions in times of crisis
Peter Aagaard, Sevasti Chatzopoulou, and Birgitte Poulsen

Mapping the changing role of expertise in COVID-19 politics in Europe
Kennet Lynggaard, Theofanis Exadaktylos, Mads Dagnis Jensen, and Michael Kluth

Expert perspectives on the changing dynamics of policy advisory systems: the COVID-19 crisis and policy learning in Belgium and Australia
Marleen Easton, Jennifer Yarnold, Valerie Vervaenen, Jasper De Paepe, and Brian W. Head

Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy [Open access]
Claire Dupont, Jeffrey Rosamond, and Bishoy L. Zaki

The promise and performance of data ecosystems: Australia’s COVID-19 response [Open access]
Cosmo Howard and Bernadette Hyland-Wood

The challenges experts face during creeping crises: the curse of complacency
Ahmad Wesal Zaman, Olivier Rubin, and Reidar Staupe-Delgado